|"Eve's Bayou" |A Film Review by |Linda Lopez McAlister |on "The Women's Show" |WMNF-FM 88.5, Tampa, FL |November 15, 1997 I haven't been this excited about a new film and a new writer/director in a long time. The film is "Eve's Bayou" and the filmmaker is Kasi Lemmons, a young African American actor and writer who has been mentored by Bill Cosby and others and who has made the most auspicious film debut I've seen in a long time. After "Daughters of the Dust," "Waiting to Exhale" and "Soul Food," we have finally got a film by an African American woman filmmaker that combines the best features of all three but avoids the various problems from which they suffered. "Eve's Bayou" is woman-centered as "Soul Food" was not, devoid of Hollywood glitz as "Exhale" was not,widely accesssible as "Daughters of the Dust" was not; it is also serious, honest, emotionally truthful, with a compelling story, beautiful cinematography (by a woman, Amy Vincent) and a superb cast of actors that features Samuel L. Jackson, Lynn Whitfield, Debbi Morgan, Vondie Curtis Hall and Diahann Carroll as well as the child from whose point of view the story is told played by Jurnee Smollett. Quite an achievement. Eve's Bayou is a place in rural Louisiana which was once part of a slave-owning plantation. Local lore has it that the plantation owner became gravely ill and one of the slave women named Eve nursed him back to health. Out of gratitude he granted her her freedom and gave her this tract of land with an beautiful house on it. The Baptiste family are Eve's descendents and the 10 year old daughter of Louis and Rosalind Baptiste is named Eve after her. The film begins with shots of the Bayou that recall the beautiful nature cinematography in "Daughters of the Dust" (and there are other elements of homage to that earlier Julie Dash film sprinkled throughout the film) but we are soon shaken loose from the quitely beautiful landscape by the voice-over narration of a grown-up Eve Baptiste when she says, "The summer I killed my father, I was 10," a line guaranteed to make an audience sit up and take notice. That summer was in the early 1960s and Louis Baptiste (Samuel L. Jackson) is on top of the world. We first encounter him at a party he is giving in the family's antebellum mansion, he is a physician, he's handsome and respected in the community, he has a beautiful wife (Lynn Whitfield) and three adoring children including fourteen year old Cicely (Meagan Good) and seven year old Poe (Jake Smollett) in addition to Eve. His mother and his sister Mozelle live nearby. Of course we already know from the first line that all is not as well as it might appear on the surface. With admirable economy we are introduced to almost the cast of characters in the party scene and we learn that there is considerable sibling rivalry between Eve and Cicely for the attentions of their father but their father's attentions are focused, for the moment, on someone else's wife, and things begin to heat up when Eve observes them having sex in the carriage house. It is her Aunt Mozelle (Debbi Morgan) whom Eve confides in and consoles after Mozelle's husband is killed in an automobile accident the night of the party. Mozelle, like her brother Louis, has a wandering eye and all three of her husbands have died, at least one the result of her philandering, so she's hesitant about getting married again. Meanwhile, she earns her living as a "spiritual counselor" because she has the gift of clairvoyance, as does Eve we find out during the course of the film. Yet there are things she does not foresee and she comes into conflict with another "fortune teller" who works a booth at the local market and is reputed to put voodoo spells on people (played, obviously against type, by Diahann Carroll, one of Hollywood's great beauties in years past). One thing she does not see coming is a distraught husband (Vondie Curtis Hall) whom you may know from "Chicago Hope" and who is filmmaker Kasi Lemmons' husband). He comes for help in locating his missing wife and stays long enough to fall in love with Mozelle. All the themes that are suggested here, seduction, betrayal, fear of the future, incest, jealousy, murder play themselves out as the scenario progresses and you do not want me to mess up Kasi Lemmons' rather film noir-ish plot structure by telling you any more. Let's just say it's a superb family melodrama that delves deeply into the hearts of the various women and girls of the Baptiste family and into that of the man with whom their lives intertwine in so many different ways. This is a don't miss film. Copyright 1997 by Linda Lopez McAlister. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint this review without getting permission from the author. Thanks.